Silverlight 3 Controls New Features - 2009 Volume 2

Create your killer apps today with blazing speed by using these new Silverlight controls, frameworks and features in NetAdvantage® for Web Client 2009 Volume 2. We support the Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 browser plug-in and have added support for the just-released Windows® 7 operating system to all controls.

xamWebSlider™ – NEW!

We give you four stylable sliders for dates, times, and numbers, plus a foundation of generic base classes so you can subclass your own slider!

Range Sliders

Each numeric and DateTime slider comes in two flavors: simple sliders for when your user only needs to set a single value, and range sliders for when you need to set the high and low values of a range. Range sliders are great for scenarios where you want to let users enter upper and lower limits, such as when filtering data.

Custom Look and Feel

You can style and template the appearance of the slider, even in some unconventional ways (e.g., using a pill bottle shape for a slider that indicates refills). Sliders can be oriented horizontally or vertically and you can customize their tickmarks and labeling.

Bring Your Own Type

BYOT means you can easily create your own xamWebSlider-derived controls based on the .NET data type you want through the trivial extension of our generic base classes. We've designed these generic base classes to encapsulate all of our Silverlight slider control's magic so you get the same rich functionality we provide in our pre-built slider controls.

Interaction Modes

Slider thumbs can behave according to one of three different interaction modes (each thumb can be given its own interaction mode):

• Free - Thumb is free to go anywhere on the slider track, bypassing other thumbs that may be in its way.
• Locked - Thumb is free to go to the left or right on the slider track, until it encounters another thumb, at which point it must stop and cannot slide further in that direction.
• Push - Thumb is free to go to the left or right on the slider track. When it encounters another thumb, it can continue to slide in that direction by "pushing" the second thumb along for the ride.

xamWebHtmlViewer™ - NEW!

We have added an embeddable viewer in xamWebHtmlViewer that lets you reuse your legacy HTML, frame Web content such as e-commerce product descriptions, slide presentations, or online help pages served by an arbitrary URL address. You can hyperlink keywords so that the corresponding HTML definition appears in the HTML viewer to add greater context-sensitivity to your applications. You can customize the HTML viewer to show or hide its scrollbars and change its height and width to fit within your UI requirements.

Behaves Just Like the Parent Browser

Our HTML viewer replicates the hosting browser environment including its context menu, and any standards and CSS conformance in its rendering. If your Silverlight application is running within Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 8 then the HTML appears just like it would be rendered in MSIE 8. If your Silverlight application is running within Mozilla® Firefox® 3.5 then the HTML appears just like it would be rendered in Firefox 3.5. Since xamWebHtmlViewer depends on its parent browser to render HTML, it cannot be used in Out-of-Browser Silverlight applications.

Load HTML from Almost Anyplace

You can direct the HTML viewer to show Web content from an arbitrary URL on the Internet, reuse legacy HTML markup that you have in your database, or render HTML markup contained in any plain old string.

xamWebContextMenu™ - NEW!

With the new Silverlight context menu control we have included in this release, your users can pop-up a menu by click or command anywhere throughout your Silverlight line of business application. xamWebContextMenu is the ideal UI control for you to use in exposing context-sensitive functionality to your users.

Builds On the Successful xamWebMenu™ Object Model

We have extended our already successful xamWebMenu object model so that all of its features for styling and templating menu items, setting horizontal or vertical orientation, and more, continue to be available to you for use within context menus that can pop-up from anyplace.

Control Placement

You can attach xamWebContextMenu to any UI control or element, and use different Placement Modes to finely tune its position, alignment, and offset from the edges of that UI control or element.

Variety of Triggers

There are many ways you can either allow your users to pop-up a context menu, or with which you can programmatically pop-up a context menu. It can open in response to left or right mouse button clicks, or in response to a WPF-like Command routed through our Commanding Framework for Microsoft Silverlight.

Infragistics Drag and Drop Framework – NEW!

Now you can control and style the entire user experience from drag to drop! In this release we share with you our flexible Drag and Drop Framework for Microsoft® Silverlight™. It lets your line of business applications feature the real-time moving of elements with user-friendly drag and drop interactions.

Drag Sources, Drop Targets

You can drag your items, we let you set the DragDropManager.DragSource attached property on your items and they work in the Infragistics Drag and Drop Framework. You can drop to your items, we let you set the DragDropManager.DropTarget attached property on your items and they work in the Infragistics Drag and Drop Framework. You can make any UIElement you have now draggable.

Drag Channels and Drop Channels

We use the concept of drag channels and drop channels so that you can identify that certain kinds of items (e.g., invoices) can only be dropped on certain other kinds of items (e.g., Accounts Payable). When you set the DragChannel of Invoice drag sources to match the DropChannel of the Accounts Payable drop target, the Drag and Drop Framework will ensure for you that your users can only drop Invoices onto Accounts Payable. If the user tries to drop something onto the Accounts Payable drop target that’s not an Invoice (or other item in the same channel), the drop operation is prevented.

Suppose you wanted to let users drag Invoices to either Accounts Payable or the Trashcan? We support multiple drag channels and drop channels, too. You can specify multiple channel names separated by commas.

Custom Cursors

You can customize the appearance of these different cursors through their templates:

• Move Cursor – Shown when a drag operation is moving an item.
• Copy Cursor – Shown when a drag operation is copying an item, such as when the drag operation started with the Control key pressed.
• "Drop Not Allowed" Cursor – Shown when the drag source is above a drop target that will not accept this drop operation (e.g., if they are of incompatible channels).

Drop Target Marker

When your users drag an item to a suitable drop target, the Drag and Drop Framework will draw a semitransparent shape highlighting the drop target to them so they know it can accept a drop. You can control the appearance of this marker with your own brush color.

Events

Drag and Drop is about an action taking place, so we fire a Drop event for you when a dragged item has reached its destined drop target. In your Drop event handler you can add an item to its new collection (and/or remove it from its old collection depending on whether it was a move or copy operation), enqueue a new invoice for the Accounts Payable department to make payment, or perform whatever other actions your line of business application requires.

We don't stop at just one event though, we fire off many more events to which you can listen:

• Drag Start
• Drag Enter
• Drag Over
• Drag Leave
• Drag End
• Drag Cancel

Each event is accompanied by event arguments that allow you to customize the appearance of the dragged item. You can use these events to trigger storyboards, for example to animate the motion of a dragged item with a Storyboard so that it snaps to a specific position within a drop target. With Infragistics Drag and Drop Framework, you have infinite possibilities!

xamWebGrid™ - Enhanced

We have added several new features to xamWebGrid, the fastest data grid available for Silverlight. It can now tally up columns of figures for you using built-in summary calculations, and offers you the extensibility you need to add your own functions. It also features two new column types, which give your users a better user experience while you do not have to do as much work.

Row Summaries

Drop down a list of 3-5 operations (depending on data type) from the Σ icon in the column header to apply a summary calculation to the cells in this row. Familiar functions like average and count are built-in, plus we allow you to create your own Summary Calculator so you can add custom operations to the drop down.

Image Columns

If you have BMP image data in your column, we use it automatically to present a picture as the cell value. You can also declare a column to be of type Image if it contains a URI to some BMP image data, and then we will use that to present a picture as the cell value.

DateTime Columns

The new DateTime column is activated whenever you have a column that is showing DateTime-typed data. If the DateTime column is editable, we will automatically use the Microsoft DatePicker control as an editor for the best user experience with no work on your part.

xamWebEditors™ - Enhanced

Since we released 2009 Volume 1 release, we have added IME support to xamWebEditors. IME support allows you to use these Silverlight editors in your line of business applications where Far East language data entry is important.